A similar incident has happened with our founder, Mr. Abhishek Bhatnagar. He had booked a return flight ticket to Barcelona, Spain, where he is going to attend the MWC 2018 in February. Owing to some reasons, he decided to cancel the flight ticket and Yatra.com gave different information about their cancellation charges and e-cash on the IVR, website and customer care number.
About the Incident
On 24th October 2017, Abhishek Bhatnagar booked a return flight ticket to Barcelona from Yatra’s website. The total ticket cost was approx. Rs. 53,000 and when he decided to cancel it, there were two cancellation charges, one levied by Airlines and the other one by Yatra. The Airlines charge is 190 Euros, which is approx. Rs. 14,500. Now, as per their website, when he was going to cancel apart from that Yatra has its own cancellation charge. The total cancellation charges it shows was Rs. 15, 629.
When he called their customer care number, they informed him that there is a Rs. 1,000 convenience charge form Yatra if you cancel online. Interestingly, their IVR message also states that Rs. 1,000 will be refunded as e-cash. So, ultimately, the customer will not have to pay any cancellation charge to Yatra. However, on the website, they were showing altogether a different story.
On their website, the online cancellation charges are mentioned as Rs. 1,250 per person. Where did these extra Rs. 250 come from? There is no mention of it, and the 18% GST charge is already included in the cancellation charges. Moreover, to his surprise, there is also no mention of their so-called e-cash. So, after all this confusion and misinformation, Abhishek decides to call their customer care number. Here again, you will be shocked to know that Yatra has hidden the contact information and it is not easy to find the number.
The customer care executive then repeated what was there on the website, that the cancellation charge is Rs. 1,250. He also denied knowing anything about e-cash as well. After informing him about their IVR information, the executive told that it was a technical issue, and assured to resolve it by Monday, December 18, 2017. However, till date no solution has been provided from their side. Moreover, if we talk about their e-cash system, they are again cheating customers with wrong information here. When Abhishek booked the flight ticket, he got Rs. 2,000 discount in the form of e-cash. Now, when he asked to close the account, the amount cannot be refunded to his bank account. You can use this amount only while booking a ticket. So, you have to use their services again, which may again lead you to another such fraud. Overall, it’s not a matter of such petty amount of money which they are charging extra, it’s about the improper information they are providing to their customers. This kind of misleading information and hidden charges may cause a lot of trouble to some customers. There is no doubt that online marketplace has made things easier for people and it is beneficial in many ways. But, when these online vendors start cheating the consumers with their misleading policies, it raises a question on their reliability. So, we recommend whenever you book a ticket or pay for any online service on any such online platform, do make you sure you have read their full terms and conditions and also confirm with their customer service number. It may take a few minutes of your time, but it will save your from any such fraud incidents.
